Not every promoter or enhancer that matters to your trait is already known. Annogen uses genome-wide SuRE™ to screen a crop’s own regulatory DNA at scale, measured directly in cells from your crop, and surface the promoters and enhancers active in a specific tissue or under a specific condition. You get a genome-wide functional profile of all native elements active exactly where and when your trait needs expression to allow pin-pointing the dials you need to tune to unlock previously-impossible traits.
Classical trait work reaches for the same viral or constitutive promoters again and again. That limits you twice: these parts rarely give the tissue or condition specificity a modern trait needs, and reusing one promoter across a multi-gene construct invites homology-dependent silencing.
Genome-wide SuRE™ takes a different route. We fragment the crop’s genome into millions of pieces, tag each with dozens of barcodes, and measure the regulatory activity of every fragment in parallel, directly in protoplasts from the relevant tissue. Run the same library under a defined condition, a pathogen elicitor, a hormone, drought or heat, and compare: the elements specifically active in that tissue, or induced by that condition, stand out from the background. The result is a ranked catalog of the crop’s own promoters and enhancers, each with a measured strength and specificity, not a shortlist inferred from sequence.
Root, seed, fruit, leaf, guard-cell and other tissue-restricted expression for trait genes.
Pathogen-, drought-, heat- or hormone-responsive elements, so a trait gene is expressed only when and where it is needed, avoiding the yield drag that constitutive expression can cause.
Enhancers that raise expression of an endogenous or introduced gene to a commercially useful level.
Crop-native replacements for 35S-type promoters, for cleaner constructs and a stronger regulatory position.
A matched set of distinct native promoters and enhancers for multi-gene constructs, chosen across the strength range you need.
What a project looks like depends on the crop, trait and candidate sequence space. Typically, it involves these steps:
SuRE™ is a massively parallel reporter assay: it measures the true regulatory activity of DNA in living plant cells, rather than predicting it from sequence. Genome-derived fragments or synthesized promoters, enhancers and other regulatory sequences, are each tracked by dozens of barcodes, giving the sensitivity to separate genuine tissue- and condition-specific elements from screening noise across an entire genome in a single experiment. SuRE™ is unversally applicable to any organism, germplasm, tissue and condition of interest.
Let’s start with your crop.
Tell us the trait, the gene and the change you are chasing, and we will show you how SuRE™ can de-risk the regulatory decisions ahead, before they reach a plant.
We imagine there could be some questions you want to ask us. Discover the most frequently asked questions about this subject right here.
